THE RISE AND FALL OF A DRAGON KING

Chronicles of Athas

Book Five

The Rise and Fall of a Dragon KingLynn Abbey

Chapter One

Nameless stars sparkled in the sky above the ancient city of Urik, casting a pale light on its black velvet fields, silver silk waterways, and the firelight jewels of its encircling market villages. On the towering walls of the mile-square city, a score of bas-relief sculptures stood guard in shadow grays and black, each an image of Sorcerer-King Hamanu, the Lion of Urik. With a sword in one hand and a scepter in the other, he kept watch over his domain.

A score of bright, sulphurous eyes looked out from the walls of Urik, bright motes of singular, unmistakable color in the chill, midnight air. Their light could be seen a day's journey beyond the irrigated fields. The eyes were beacons for honest travelers who journeyed during the cooler nighttime hours and warnings to covetous adventurers: The Lion of Urik never sleeps, never closes his eyes. King Hamanu's city could not be taken by surprise or pried from his pitiless grasp.

Within the city's walls, where the gemstone eyes did not shine, men and women wearing tunics of a similar sulphur color kept their king's laws, their king's peace, which should have been a simple enough task. Urik did not have many laws and they rarely, if ever, changed. King Hamanu's curfew had not changed since it was decreed a thousand years ago: Between the appearance of the tenth star after sundown and the start of the next day, no citizenman or woman, child or slavewas allowed to set foot on the king's streets. By starlight, there should have been nothing for the king's templars to watch except each other.

But since the dawn of timelong before the Lion-King bestrode Urik's wallsthe laws kings made applied only to the law-abiding folk of their domains. Wise kings made laws that wise folk willingly obeyed. Wiser kings learned that no net of laws could govern everyone beneath them, nor should they strive to do so. King Hamanu let the pots of Urik simmer nightly, and in a thousand years, they had boiled over no more than a handful of times.

* * * * *"Halt!" the yellow-robed templar commanded as he separated himself from a clot of similarly clad men and women. Here, within spitting distance of Urik's Elven Market, King Hamanu's minions coagulated for their own safety, traveling in threes and fours, rarely in pairs, never aloneespecially at night.

The pair of mul slaves bearing a pole-slung sedan chair came to an easy-gaited halt that did not jostle their passenger. Four slave torchbearers arranged themselves in a diamond pattern around them. The muls set the chair gently on the cobblestones. They slipped the hardwood poles out of the carriage braces, then stood at attention, each resting a pole against his massively muscled left-side shoulder.

"Who breaks the king's curfew?" the templar demanded. The severity of his tone was belied by the continuing conversation of his peers beside him.

The lead torchbearer, a half-elf of singularly unpleasant appearance, looked down on the human templar with fourth-rank hemstitching in his left sleeve. "O Mighty One, we bear my lord Ursos," she answered confidently.

She had had no accent, save for the common accent of Urik, until she spoke her master's name with the distinctive drawl of far-off Draj. It beggared imagination that a Drajan lord would travel the curfewed streets of Urikespecially these anarchic times since the Dragon's demise and the simultaneous disappearance of King Hamanu's Drajan counterpart, Tectuktitlay.

The templar scowled. Whoever rode in the sedan chair, his nameor her namewasn't likely Ursos.

"By whose leave does Lord Ursos break curfew?" he continued.

The half-elf shifted her torch to her left hand. She was unarmed, as were her five companions: slaves were, by Hamanu's law, unarmed. By law, all citizens, including lords who traveled in sedan chairs, were unarmed. Weapons were the templars' prerogative. The fourth-rank templar carried a staff not quite half as long as the muls' hardwood poles, and the half-elf's torch bore an uncanny resemblance to a gladiator's club, down to the leather wrapping on its haft and the egg-shaped killing stone lashed to its base.

He repeated himself, "By whose leave does your lord break curfew?" loudly and somewhat anxiously.

His wall-leaning peers at last abandoned their conversation. The slave's right arm disappeared in folds of her funnel-shaped sleeve. There was a moment of thick tension in the moonlight until it reappeared with a small leather pouch, which the templar passed to one of his companions for examination.

"By your leave, O Mighty One."

"It's all here," the inspecting templar announced, extracting two metallic pieces from the pouch before passing it to the templar beside him.

"The lion watch over you, then, and your lord," the first templar said as he retreated.

"And over you, O Mighty One," the slave replied, as much a curse as a blessing.

* * * * *The sedan chair and its escort stopped short of the Elven Market. Without hesitation, the party turned and disappeared into an alley whose existence couldn't have been discerned with the light of a score of pitch-soaked torches, much less the four they carried. Some distance into the cramped darkness, they stopped again. The half-elf rapped once on a hollow, drumlike door, and a rectangle of ruddy lantern light suddenly surrounded them. The muls carried the sedan chair across the threshold. The escort extinguished their torches and closed the door behind them.

Inside the vestibule, a person emerged from the chair. With his face obscured by an unadorned mask and his body swaddled in a drab cloak, it was easier to say what race Lord Ursos wasn'tnot dwarf or mul, not halfling, nor full-grown elfthan what race he might be.

The ragged, menial slave who'd opened the door had run away when he saw the escorted sedan chair. He returned with another slave, of higher status, who was clad in pale, translucent linen that left no doubt about her sex. With a soft voice, she showed the escort where to leave the sedan chair, and then directed them down a corridor, to a door that provided discreet entrance to a boisterous tavern. When the escort was gone, the vestibule was once again silenta silence so sudden and absolute one might suspect magic in the air. Without breaking that silence, the slave led the masked Lord Ursos down a narrow stairway to a curtained doorway. She bowed low before the curtain and swept her arm gracefully toward it, but made no move to pass between the rippling lengths of silk.

Lord Ursos strode past her, removing the drab cloak with one hand and the mask with the other as he swept through the silk into the upper gallery of an underground amphitheater. He was a lean, sinewy human, with the sunken features of a man who'd indulged his every passion, yet survived. With the casual contempt of an aristocrat, the lord held out his drab outer garments for a slave at the top of the amphitheater stairs. The slave hesitated, his arms half-extended.

"My lord," he whispered anxiously. "Who are?" The slave caught himself; slaves did not ask such questions. "Do you?" And caught himself again, in evident despair. No one, not even an elegant lord, entered this place without an invitation.

Lord Ursos understood. Smiling indulgently, he gestured with a dancer's swift grace. When he was finished, he held a delicate, star-shaped ceramic token between the tips of his thumb and forefinger.

"Ah" The slave returned a smile as the token dropped into his hand. He relaxed audibly, visibly. "Your place is prepared, my lord. If my lord will simply follow me?"

A place was indeed prepared, a place in the front row, along the rail, overlooking a circular pit floored with dark sand that sparkled in the light of wall-mounted torches. Another slave, who'd followed them down the amphitheater's steep, stair-cut ramp, offered the lord a shallow bowl filled with a thick, glistening fluid. The lord refused with another dancerlike gesture, and the bowl-bearer hurried away.

"My lord," the first slave began, his eyes lowered and his hands trembling. "Is there? Would you prefer... a pipe, perhaps, or another beverage, a different beverage?"

"Nothing."

The lord's voice was deeper than the slave had expected; he retreated, stumbling, and barely regained his balance.

A certain type of man might come to this place for its entertainments, having paid handsomely in gold for the privilege. All the other men in the amphitheaterthere were a score of guests, with several races represented, but no women among themclutched bowls between their hands and metal sipping straws likewise gripped between their teeth. Their faces were slack, their eyes wide and fixed. A man who disdained the sipping bowl or the dream-pipe was a rare guest, a disturbing guest.

The second slave could not meet this guest's eyes again.

"Leave me," the lord commanded, and, gratefully, the slave escaped, his sandals slapping with unseemly vigor on the stairs.

The lord settled on the upholstered bench to which his token entitled him and waited patiently as another handful of guests arrived and were escorted to their appropriate places. Then, while the latecomers sucked and sipped, a door opened in the wall of the pit. Slaves entered first, wrestling a rack of bells and cymbals through the sand. Before the melodic discord faded, a quartet of musicians entered, swaddled completely in black and apparent only as velvet darkness on the sparkling sand.

Anticipation gripped the guests. Someone dropped his bowl. The clash of pottery shards echoed through the amphitheater, bringing hisses of disapproval from other guests, though not from the patient, empty-handed lord seated along the rail.

Another door opened, larger than the first, spreading a rectangle of ruddy light across the pit. The polished brass bells and cymbals cast fiery reflections among the guests, who ignored them. Nothing could draw their attention from the three low-wheeled carts being trundled onto the sand. An upright post of mekillot bone rose from each cart, a crossbar was lashed to each post, and a living mortaltwo women and a manwas lashed to each crossbar, arms spread wide, as if in flight.

One of the women moaned as the wheels of her cart churned into the sand. Her strength failed. She sagged against the bonds holding her to the post and bar. The titillating scent of abject terror rose from the pit; patient Lord Ursos was patient no longer. He pushed back his sleeves and set his elbows upon the rail.

When the carts were set, the slaves departed, and the musicians struck a single tone: flute, lyre, bells, and cymbals together. It was a perfectly pitched counterpoint to the woman's moan. The fine hairs on the lord's bare arms rose in expectation as the night's master strode silently across the sand.

There were no words of introduction or explanation. None were needed. Everyone in the amphitheaterfrom the slaves in the top row of the gallery to those in the pit, especially those unfortunates bound against bone in the pitknew what would happen next.

The night's master drew a little, curved knife from the depths of his robe. Its blade was steel, more precious than gold, and it gleamed in the torchlight when he brandished it for the guests. Then he angled it carefully, and its reflection illuminated a small portion of the bound man's flank. The prisoner gasped as the first cuts were made, one on either side of a floating rib, and howled as the master slowly peeled back his flesh. The lyrist took the first improvisation in the time-honored manner, weaving the middle tones together, leaving the highs for the chimes and the lows for the flute.

Brandishing his knife a second time, the master made a second, smaller, gash across the bloody stream. He dipped his free hand in a pouch below his waist and smeared a white, crystalline powder into the new wound. The bound man gasped and strained against the crossbar. Tinkling cymbals framed his thin, close-mouthed wail, and the flutist blew a haunting note to unite them.

The bare-armed lord sat back from the rail. His sleeves fell, disregarded, back to his wrists as his eyes closed and his hands folded into fists. His breath came rapidly as the melody took shape in music and mortal suffering. The tones were too potent for some of the guests around him; they added their own whimpering harmonies to the night master's music. Symphony and empathy together sent a shiver along the lord's spine. But the shiver died before it reached his throat, and he alone, except for the master, remained silent.

The melody continued to evolve, not attaining its final form until the three captives were bleeding, weeping, and wailing: an eight-tone trope, four ascending, then the lowest, followed by a three-tone cascade through the middle range.

The dark passion of the night master's music quieted the lord's restless thoughts and gave him a moment of peace, but, born from mortal flesh as it was, the melody ended all too soon. One by one the captive voices failed. Where there had been music, only meat remained. The master departed, and then the musicians, the guests, and the slaves, also, until the lord was alone.

Utterly alone.

His lips parted, and music, at last, rose from his throat: an eight-tone trope, four ascending, then the lowest, followed by a three-tone cascade through the middle range.

* * * * *Much later, when all but Urik's rowdiest taverns had fallen into a stupor and templars drowsed against their spears, the midnight peace of one humble dwellinga tiny room tucked beneath roof-ribs, broiling by day and frigid by nightwas broken by an infant's angry squalling. The mother, sleeping on a rag-and-rope bed beside her man, awoke at once, but kept her eyes squeezed shut, as if sheer denial or force of will could quiet her unhappy daughter.

It was a futile hope. Tooth fever, that's what the infant's malady was called by the widowed crones, who sat all day beside the neighborhood wellhead. The baby would cry until her teeth came in and the swelling in her gums subsided. Both mother and daughter were lucky to have gotten any sleep at all.

"Do something," the man grumbled, rolling away from her, taking her blanket with him to pile over his ears.

He was a good man: never drank, never raised his voice or fist, but went out at dawn each morning and sweated all day in the kiln-blast of his uncle's pottery. He was afraid of his daughter, astonished that something so pale and delicate would, if Fortune's wheel were as round and true as his uncle's, someday call him Father. He wanted to do well by his offspring, but now, when all she needed was warm hands and a swaying shoulder, he was reduced to surly helplessness. So, the woman swung her legs over the side and swept her tangled hair out of her eyes.

There was light in the room. She silently cursed herself for leaving the lamp lit. An open flame was a danger to themher man and her daughter and every other mortal in the neighborhood. It was also a waste of oil, a waste of money, which was scant these days, with her unable to work. In the instant before her vision cleared, the mother saw disaster in her mind's eye: her man, groggy because he hadn't slept and clumsy for the same reason, blundering against the kiln, screaming, and dooming them all to poverty, to death.

With that image fresh in her thoughts, she was too distracted to cry out when she saw another womana strangersitting on the stool beside her daughter's cradle. She reached blindly for the lamp, which was not lit. The light came from the stranger; it surrounded her and the infant.

"Lame..."

That word, her man's name, came weakly from the mother's tongue. It failed to rouse Lame, but drew the attention of the dark-haired stranger whose eyes, when she turned, were huge in her face and gray as the infant's.

"Rest you, now," the stranger said in a sweet and gentle twilight voice. "Rest you... Cissa. Come the sun and your daughter's pain will be gone."

"Yes," Cissa agreed slowly. A part of her was caught in panic: a stranger in her home, a stranger holding her daughter. A stranger whom Cissa would have remembered if she'd ever seen her before, a stranger who sat bathed in light that had no source. "Lame" she called more strongly than before. "Larne."

"Rest you, both," the stranger insisted. "The child is safe with me."

"Safe," Cissa repeated. The stranger's smile wrapped its arms around her and vanquished her panic. "Safe. Yes, safe."

"None in Urik is safer," the stranger agreed, and Cissa, at last, believed.

She returned to the rumpled bed where her man's warm shadow beckoned.

The radiant, gray-eyed stranger gave her attention back to the infant. She was not one for gurgly noises or nonsense syllables or mimicking a kank's jointed antennae with her fingers. She charmed the pained and weary child with a wordless lullaby.

The infant's fists unclenched. Her little furrowed face relaxed when the stranger stroked her down-covered scalp. The child reached for a thick lock of the stranger's midnight hair. They shared a trilling note of laughter, and then the stranger sang againan eight-tone trope, four ascending, then the lowest, then a three-tone cascade through the middle rangetheme and variations until the tooth had risen and the infant slept easy in a stranger's arms.

* * * * *He began his journey when the air was cool and the day no more than a bright promise above the eastern rooftops. With his bowl tucked inside his tattered, skimpy tunic and his crutch wedged beneath his shoulder, he made his way from the alley where he slept, safe and warm beneath a year's accumulation of rubbish, to the northwest corner of Joiner's Square. The baker's shop on that corner had a stoop that was shaded all day and wider than its doorwide enough for a crippled beggar to sit, plying the trade he'd never chosen to master. He inconvenienced no one, especially Nouri, the baker, who sometimes let him scrounge crumbs off the floor at the end of the day.

It was a long journey from his alley to the baker's shop, and a treacherous one. The least mistake planting his crutch among the cobblestones would throw him off his unsteady feet. He was careful, wriggling the crutch a bit each time he set it down before entrusting it with his weight and balance.

When he was sure of it, he'd grip the shaft in both hands and thenholding his breath, always holding his breath for that risky momenthop his good leg forward. Then he'd drag his crippled leg, his aching, useless leg, afterward.

His shoulder hurt worse than the leg by the time he could see the baker's stoop ahead of him. The beggar-king to whom he paid his dues said he should forego the crutch, said he'd live longer and earn more if he dragged himself along with his arms. And it might come to that. Some days the sun was noon-high before the numbness in his arm subsided from his morning journey. He had pride, though. He'd stand and walk as best he could until he had no choice, and then, maybe, he'd simply choose to die.

But not today.

"Hey, cripple-boy! Slow down, cripple-boy."

A handful of gravel came with the greeting. He shook it off and planted his crutch in the next likely spot. He couldn't slow down, not without stopping entirely; didn't dare twist around to count his tormentors. Bullies, he knew from long experience, seldom went alone.

"Hey, cripple-boy! I'm talkin' to you, cripple-boy!"

"Cripple-boywhat's the difference between you an' a snake?"

There were three of them, he had that knowledge before a meaty hand clamped across the back of his neck and shook him hard.

"Snakes don't die till sundown, cripple-boy, but you're gonna die now."He hit the cobblestones with his crutch in his hands, for all the good it would do him. He didn't recognize them, certainly hadn't ever done them any harm. That wouldn't matter. They were predators; he was prey. It was as simple as that, and as quick. There was an alley behind him, and though a whole man would undoubtedly say that its shadows and debris would work to a predator's advantage, not his, he dragged himself toward it, still clinging to his crutch.

The trio behind were whole men and able to see advantage in the alley. The nearest wrested the crutch away while the other two seized the beggar by the hair and belt and threw him bodily into the alley's deep shadows.

* * * * *Nouri couldn't have said what drew him out of his shop's oven-filled courtyard and put him at the counter at just that moment. Perhaps he'd had a reason and forgotten it. Dawn was the end of his day. His customers were workmen, laborers who bought their bread first thing in the morning, ate what they needed, and took the crusts home to feed their families when their work was done. Perhaps, though, it was the Lion's whim: an urge of fortune best blamed on Urik's mighty king. Either way, or something else entirely, Nouri was behind the counter, staring out the open door, when the adolescent thugs seized the beggar.

His beggar.

Father had always said a beggar was good for businessa polite and clean beggar with an obvious but not hideous deformity. The crippled boy was all that, and more: His wits weren't afflicted. He kept an eye on the street, an open ear for passing conversation, for thieves and thugs and, on occasion, profit.

If the boy had ever asked, Nouri would have given him a nighttime place beneath the counter. But the boy was proud, in his way; he wouldn't take charity, not above his place on the stoop or a few broken crusts of bread.

Nouri was always a bit relieved when he heard the boy thump and settle on the stoop. Urik was a dangerous place for anyone who didn't have a door to lock himself behind. In his heart, Nouri had known that the morning would come when the beggar wouldn't appear. But he hadn't imagined the boy would come to his end not fifty paces from his shop's stoop.

The tools of Nouri's trade hung on the wall behind him. Not least among them was the wedge-shaped mallet he used to beat down the risen dough between kneadings; it could be used for beating down other things... murderous young thugs who thought a crippled boy was fair game.

Nouri's wife, Maya, and his three journeymen were in courtyard unloading the oven. Maya would have stopped him if she'd seen him with the mallet in his hand, heading out the door. And the journeymen would have been some assurance of his own safety: he was bigger than any of the youths, but not all of them together. If he'd taken the time to think at all, he might well have thought better of justice. Urik had enough beggars, and his stoop was an attractive place for their trade; he'd have another soon enough. Nouri wasn't a templar or a thug; he'd never struck a man in anger, not even his apprentices, who deserved a beating now and again.

But Nouri didn't stop to think. He crossed the street and charged down the alley at a flat-out run. With a backhand swing of the mallet, he caught the laggard of the trio from behind. The youth went down with a shout that alerted his companions, the biggest of whom was also the closest. Paste-faced with fear, the thug tried to defend himself with the crippled boy's crutch, but the weight of Nouri's mallet swept the lighter shaft aside.

The baker delivered a blow that shattered teeth and released a spray of blood and saliva from the thug's mouth. Nouri was defenseless and vulnerable in the wake of the violence he'd done, but the third thug didn't linger to press his advantage. The last youth hied himself out of the alley without a backward glance for his bloodied and fallen companions.

"Get out," Nouri suggested in a voice he scarcely recognized as his own. "Get out now, and don't show your faces around here again."

It was good advice, and Bloodymouth retained the wit to take it. He hauled his stunned companion to his feet, and with arms linked around each other for support, they beat a clumsy retreat to the street.

With his free hand, Nouri retrieved the undamaged crutch. Aside from his own pounding pulse and ragged breathing, there were no other sounds in the alley, no other movements. Nothing at all to say he wasn't alone.

"Boy?" he called into the shadows. "Janni?" He thought that was the boy's name; you or bay were usually sufficient to get his attention when he sat on the stoop. "Don't be afraid, boy. Are you hurt, boy?"

Then, fearing the worstthat he'd been too lateNouri set down both mallet and crutch. He waded into the shadows and began flinging rubbish aside before familiar sounds snared his attention: tap, thump, and drag; tap, thump, and drag again. The cold hand of fear clutched the baker's heart as he turned toward the light and the street.

Janni, the crippled boy, reached the stoop while Nouri watched. He lowered himself to the flat stone, same as he did each morning, and secured his crutch behind him before arranging his twisted leg on the cobblestones where passersby and Nouri's customers could see both it and the wrapped-straw begging bowl.

"Whim of the Lion," Nouri whispered. His hands had risen of their own will to cover his heart. He forced them down to his sides, though his fear had not abated, and the foreboding had only just begun.

"What have I done?" he asked himself.

The kneading mallet lay where he'd left it, bloodstained the same as Nouri's shirt. But the crutch... was gone. The only crutch Nouri could see was the one propped against his shop's wall.

"Whim of the Lion," he repeated and turned back to the shadows as his gut heaved.

* * * * *Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, King of the World, King of the Mountains and the Plains, and a score of other titles claimed during his thousand-year rule of the city, could soften be found on the highest roof of his sprawling palace. The royal apartments were on the roof. The doors and chambers could have accommodated a half-giant, though the furnishings were scaled for a human man, and austere as well, despite their gilding and bright enamel.

The king sat at a black marble table outside the lattice-walled apartments and stared absently toward the east, where the sun had risen an hour earlier. Hamanu hummed a tune as he sat, an eight-tone trope. A hint of midnight's coolness clung to the shadow behind him. A robe of lustrous silk hung loosely about his powerful torso. Its dull crimson color perfectly complemented his tawny gold skin and the black mane that swept back from a smooth, intelligent forehead to fall in thick, shiny elflocks against his shoulders.

There was no softness anywhere about him. His eyes held the deep yellow color of ripe agafari blossoms; his lips were firm and dark above a beardless chin. The faint crinkles around his eyes might have marked him as a man of good humor, who enjoyed a frequent, hearty laughbut they could as easily be the brands of a cruel nature.

A sword of steel so fine it shone like silver in the sun rested blade-up in an ebony rack behind the king. Two darkly seething obsidian spheres sat on cushioned pedestals, one at the sword's tip, the other beside its hilt. Suits of polished armor in various sizes and styles stood ready on the backs of straw men. The armor showed signs of wear, but not a trace of the gritty, yellow dust that was the bane of Urik's housekeepers, as if the king's mere presence were enough to control the vagaries of wind and weatherwhich it was.

Hamanu blinked and stirred, shedding distraction as he rose from his chair. A balustrade of rampant lions defined the roof's edge. He leaned his hand on a carved stone mane and squinted hard at his domain until he'd seen what he needed to see, heard what he wanted to hear. His face relaxed. His thoughts drifted to more familiar places: the mind of his personal steward these last hundred years.

Enver, it's time.The dwarf's answer came in obedience, not words, as he abandoned his breakfast and hurried toward the roof, shouting orders left and right as he ran.

Hamanu smiled and patted the stone lion lightly on its head. He'd had a satisfying night, last night. This morning he was disposed to indulgence and good humor.

He was seated behind the marble table again when Enver made his appearance, leading a small herd of slaves bearing breakfast trays and baskets filled with petitions and bribes.

"Omniscience, the bloody sun of Athas shines brightly on you and all your domain this morning!" Enver announced with reverence and a well-practiced bow from the waist.

"Does it, now?" Hamanu replied with arch inflection. "Whatever has happened, dear Enver?" Indulgence did not precludeand good humor well-nigh demandeda taste of mortal fear before breakfast.

"Nothing, Omniscience," the dwarf replied, flustered with piquant terror.

The slaves behind Enver clumped into a cowering mass that endangered the safe arrival of Hamanu's breakfast. He didn't need to eat. There was very little that Hamanu needed to do. But he wanted his breakfast, and he wanted it on the table, not the floor or splattered across the day's petitions.

"Good, Enver." Hamanu's smile had teeth: blunt, human teeth, though, like everything else about him, that could change in a eye blink. "Exactly as it should be. Exactly as I expect."

Enver bobbled a less-enthusiastic smile and the slaves shuttled trays and baskets to the table before scurrying to the far corner of the roof and the out-of-sight safety of the stairway. Hamanu caught their relieved sighs in his preternatural hearing. He could hear anything in Urik, if he chose to listen; his vision was almost as keen. More than that, he could kill with a thought and draw sustenance from a mortal's dying breath.

And sometimes he didfor no reason greater than whim or boredom or aching appetite. But today, a loaf of fresh-baked bread was the only sustenance that interested him. With manners to equal the most pampered noblewoman's, the king broke the loaf apart, then dipped a small, steaming chunk in amber honey before raising it to his lips.

Fear was intoxicating, but fear could not compare to the changeable taste and texture of a yeast-risen mixture of flour and water when it was still hot from the oven..

"Enver," Hamanu said between morsels, "there's a bakery at the northeast corner of Joiner's Square"

"It shall be closed at once, Omniscience, and the baker sent to the mines," Enver eagerly assured him, adding another bow and an arm-wave flourish for good measure.

The dwarf was more than Hamanu's steward; he was a templar, an executor, the highest rank within the civil bureau. Enver's left sleeve was so laced with precious metal and silk that it fell a handspan beyond his fingertips as he remained folded in the depth of his bow. It was a ridiculous pose and a futile attempt on Enver's part to hide his disapproval behind an obsequious mask. The fear was back as well, a fetid vapor in the warming air.

Hamanu ignored the temptation, trying instead to remember if he'd been either more capricious or predictable of late. He strove to remember each day precisely as it happened, but after thirteen ages it was difficult to separate memory from dreams. A man like Enver, or the druid-templar Pavek, or any one of his score of current favorites, had simpler memories and a more reliable conscience.

Today, however, Enver had exercised his conscience needlessly.

"I have something else in mind, dear Enver. The baker there" He paused, casting his thoughts adrift in Urik until they found the mind he wanted"Nouri Nouri'son, he saved my life this morning."

Enver straightened his spine and his sleeve. "Omniscience, may I inquire how this occurred?"

"Oh, the usual way." Hamanu sopped up honey with another morsel of bread, chewed it slowly, savoring both it and the dwarf's bursting curiosity. "The streets were dirty. I'd retreated into an alley to cleanse them, but this baker, Nouri Nouri'son, took it upon himself to rescue me with a kneading mallet."

"Remarkable, Omniscience."

"True. All-too-sadly true. He was so intent on saving me that he let the criminals get away."

"Get away, Omniscience? Not for long, surely."

"No, no, dear Enver. They live, two of them, anyway. They seemedhow do you so charmingly put it?they seemed to have learned a lesson, and I could hardly overrule the baker's justice, could I?"

Enver shook his head. "But you're watching them, Omniscience?"

"Dear Enver, of course I'm watching them. Even now I'm watching them. But, we were talking about the baker, weren't we? Yes. I have a task for you. I want two sacks of the finest flournot warehouse flour, but my flour, white himali from the palacetaken to that baker's shop on Joiner's Square, and a purse of silver, tooelse he'll fire the ovens with inix dung! Tell him he is to bake a score of loaves, the best loaves he's ever baked, and to deliver them to the palace before sundown."

The dwarf's grin was as broad and round as Guthay on New Year's Eve. The executor was quick with numbers and devious despite his rigorous conscience. Nouri Nouri'son could buy a year's worth of charcoal with a purseful of silver, and unless the man were a complete failure at his trade, he could make a hundred loaves with two sacks of palace flour.

"I shall be seen, Omniscience," Enver said, more eagerly than before. "The merchant lords, the high templars, the nobles, too, and all their cooks, I shall be seen by them all, Omniscience. By sundown the entire city will know you're eating bread baked by Nouri Nouri'son. They'll stand in line outside his doors."

"Mind you, dear Enver, it's a small shop on a small square. I think, perhaps, half the city would be sufficient. A quarter might be wiser."

"Word will spread, Omniscience."

Hamanu nodded. No one would have noticed three bodies in an alley. No one had noticed the solitary corpse he'd left in a doorway somewhat south of the square. But a generous gesture, that would change lives in ways not even he could predict.

"Is that all, Omniscience?"

The king nodded, then called his steward back. If he was going to make a generous gesture to the man who saved his life, he might as well make a similar gesture to the one whose life he'd borrowed. "There'll be a beggar on the stoop. A human youth with a crippled leg. Put something useful in his bowl."

"Oh, yes, Omniscience! Will that be all, Omniscience?"

"One last thing, before you return to the palace, hie yourself to the fountain in Lion's Square and throw a coin over the edge."

Enver's grin faded as his eyes widened. "Omniscience, what should I wish for?"

"Whythat Nouri Nouri'son's bread is as good as his kneading mallet, what else?"Chapter Two

Hamanu's morning audiences began when Enver left the roof. They ended when the king had broken the seal on the last scroll in the baskets on his marble table and had summoned, by a mind-bending prick of conscience, the last petitioner in the unwindowed and, therefore, stifling, waiting chamber below.

Sometimes petitioners abandoned their quest for a private audience before they felt the unforgettable terror of their king's presence in their thoughts. Sometimes Hamanu didn't second-guess a petitioner's misgiving. Other times he pursued the tender-hearted spirit throughout Urik and beyond; he had that power. After thirteen ages of practice, Hamanu could give his whims wills of their own and set them free to wander his city as he himself did almost every night, borrowing shape and memorystealing themand making another life his own for a moment, a year, or a lifetime.

Hamanu had a handful of willful whims and stolen shapes loose in the city just then, and touched them lightly as the day's last petitioner climbed the stairs. A thief who'd shown creative promise in his craft had seized a womana child, really, half his ageand forced her to the ground in the kitchen yard of her own modest home.

The king seared the thief's mind and flesh with a single thought. The last image that passed through the thief's senses was the woman screaming as her rapist's hot blood burst over her. Then the thief was thoroughly dead, and the last petitioner was walking across the palace roof.

The civil bureau templars who prepared the petitions for fees, bribes, and other favorshad written the plea of a merchant named Eden. Hamanu had mistaken Eden for a man's name, and mistaken the mind he'd touched moments ago for a man's mind, too. Everyone made mistakes. Enver notwithstanding, Hamanu was not omniscient. He didn't know everything and couldn't know everything about a living mind. The dead were another matter, of course. A dead mind yielded all its secrets, after which it was useless. Hamanu didn't kill for secrets.

Deceit was another matter.

He watched the merchantEdenlift the hem of her gown and step over the blasted remains of the day's most unfortunate petitioner. Most unfortunate, so far.

Her mind was filled with disgust, not fear. For the corpse, Hamanu hoped. As himselfas Hamanu, King of Urikhe dealt with few women, save templars and whores. His reputation was burdened with an ancient layer of tarnish. Respectable families hid their wives and daughters from him, as if that had ever protected anyone.

This Eden, with her white linen gown, pulled-back hair, and unpainted face, was the epitome of respectability. Far more respectable than the young noblemanthe late, young noblemanwhose bowels were beginning to stink in the brutal sunlight.

Hamanu didn't truly mind that Renady Soleuse had inherited his estate through the proven expedient of slaughtering his father and his brothers and the rest of his inconvenient kin; link's king didn't meddle in family affairs. And Hamanu wasn't outraged that the accusations of water-theft Renady leveled against his neighbors were whole-cloth lies; audacity was, in truth, a reliable pathway to royal favor. But the young man had lied when Hamanu had asked questions about the financial health of the Soleuse estate, and worse, the fool had counted on a defiler charlatan's lizard-skin charm to protect him while he lied.

Hamanu killed for deceit.

The hereditary honor of Soleuse had been extinguished with thought and fire, both somewhat sorcerous in origin and wielded with a soldier's precision. Now, Hamanu and Urik were short a noble family to manage the farms and folk the Soleuse had been lord to. Most likely he'd offer the honor to Enver. After more than an age overseeing a king's private life, Hamanu judged that the affairs of a noble estate should be child's play for the likes of Enver. But, perhaps he'd offer the spoils of Soleuse to this Eden, this plain half-elf woman with a man's name.

He'd hate to have to kill her. Two petitioners in one morning: that was both careless and wasteful.

"Why are you here?" Hamanu asked. His templars had written that she offered trade. No surprise there: she was a merchant; trade was her life's work. But, what sort of trade? "Recount."

She hesitated, moistening her lips with a pasty tongue and wrinkling her linen gown between anxious fingers. "O Mighty King of Urik, King of Athas, King of the Mountains" Her face turned as pale as her gown: she'd lost the rhythm of his titles and her mindHamanu knew for certainhad gone blank.

"And so on," he said helpfully. "You have my attention."

"I am charged with a message from my husband, Chorlas, colleague of the House of Werlithaen."

"I know the name Werlithaen," Hamanu admitted. As the name implied, the Werlithaen were elves. Three generations back, they'd been elves who'd exchanged their kank herds for the tumult of Urik's almost-legal Elven Market. About an age ago, a few of the tribe had abandoned the Market for the civilized ways of the merchant houses. A step down, no doubt, in the eyes of the Werlithaen kindred, and sufficient to account for Eden's plain, diluted features.

The petition had mentioned trade, not a message, but knowledge was sometimes more valuable than water or gold and a sound basis for trade. Eden hadn't yet deceived him.

"What manner of message?" the king continued, curious as to the sort of bargain this woman would offer.

Eden made what appeared to be another nervous gesture, fondling the large, pale-green ceramic beads of her bracelet. There was a click that earned Hamanu's undivided attention, and when her hands separated, a coil of parchment bounced in her trembling fingers.

It could just as easily have been a poison dart or a magician's charm, neither of which could have harmed him. Hamanu was, above all else, not the tawny-skinned human man he appeared to be. But his guards should have found it. There'd be an accounting before sunset.

"My husband bade me give you this."

The coil dropped from her fingers onto the black marble table. Hamanu retrieved it and read the words Chorlas had written, telling about three hundred wooden staves caravaned east, out of Nibenay, to a deserted oasis and left, unattended, by moonlight. The staves appeared to be plain brown wood, according to Chorlas, who was in a position to know, having been the owner of that east-bound caravan. But the staves left stains on the palms of the caravaneers who handled them and, afterward, the formerly brown wood had acquired a distinctly bronze-metallic sheen.

Agafari wood, no doubt, Nibenay's most precious resource and a reliable weapon against the serrated obsidian edges of Urik's standard-issue swords. Urik and Nibenay weren't at war, not openly, though there hadn't been true peace between the Lion and the Shadow-King since they'd laid claim to their respective domains long ago. And there'd been no trade between the cities these last three years, for which lapse there were as many reasons as there were grudges between Hamanu and his brother monarch, not least of which was the misfortuned ambition of a Urikite templar named Elabon Escrissar.

Indeed, at the moment, no legal trade passed between Urik and any other city in the old human-dominated heartland. No visitors, either. Folk stayed within Hamanu's purview, if that's where they were when he'd issued his decree, or they stayed outside it, under penalty of death.

There was trade, of course; no city was entirely self-sufficient, though, with well-stocked warehouses, Hamanu's Urik could withstand a siege of many years. The laws merely complicated and compounded the risks all merchants knowingly took when they carried goods among the rival city-states, and gave Hamanu the pretextas if he needed oneto interfere.

"Was your husband in Nibenay when he wrote this?" Hamanu asked mildly, maliciously. If she lied, he'd know it instantly. If she told the truth, she'd be an accomplice in illegal trade, the punishment for whichat a minimum was the loss of an eye.

"He was, O Mighty King. He sent this at great risk and bade me bring it here at once. And I did" she raised her head and, despite crashing waves of cold-blooded terror, met Hamanu's smoldering stare with her own. "Five days ago, O Mighty King."

So, she dared to be indignant with him. On a bad day, that was a death sentence; today, it intrigued him. Hamanu ran a fingertip over Chorlas's words, reading the man who'd written them.

"There was another message," he concluded.

"Only that I was to come directly to you, O Mighty King, as I have already said."

"Your husband has placed you in great danger, dear lady, or do you claim not to know that it is against my laws to have discourse or trade with the Nibenese?"

"O Mighty King, my husband is Urikite born and raised."

Hamanu nodded. His edict isolating Urik from the anarchy spreading across Athas in the wake of the Dragon's demise had sundered families, especially the great, far-flung merchant dynasties, and his was not the only such edict: Tyr and Gulg and Nibenay itself had raised similar prohibitions;

Giustenal had never been without them. But trade and risk were inseparable, as the woman standing before him surely knew.

"That changes nothing, dear lady. I have forbidden all commerce. You have imperiled your life at your husband's bidding. Your life, dear lady, not his. And for what? What trade could justify the risk?" Hamanu could imagine several, but Eden might surprise him, and notwithstanding the content of the message she'd brought him, which was itself enough to merit reward, Hamanu cherished surprises.

Anxiety froze Eden's tongue in her mouth; Hamanu despaired of any surprise, then she spoke:

"O Mighty King, my husband and I, we judge it likely that the king of Nibenay is arming Urik's enemies."

"And?" Hamanu demanded. Her reasoning, though concurred with his own, wasn't the surprise he'd hoped for.

"My husband is old, O Mighty King. He took me into his house when my mother died, as a favor to her father, who'd been a friend in their youths. Chorlas raised me as his granddaughter, and then, when I was old enough, he made me his wife." Her voice broke, not with bitterness, but with that rarest of all mortal passions: lifelong love. "My husband's heart is weak, O Mighty King, and his senses are not so sharp as they once were. Nibenay is not his home, O Mighty King. He doesn't wish to die there without having seen the sun set against the yellow walls or the Lion's fountain one last time."

"So he sends you to tell me that Nibenay arms my enemies? That the House of Werlithaen supplies the caravan? And for this mote of good news he expects me to leave Urik's gates ajar so he might return?"

"Yes, O Mighty King. My husband knows the precise location of the deserted oasis; it was not charted on any of his mapsuntil now."

"The master merchant of Werlithaen thinks that because he did not know the location of an oasis, then / would not know it either."

"Yes, O Mighty King," Eden repeated. Chorlas of Werlithaen had raised her well. She was afraid of him; that was only wise, but fear was not her master. She continued, "It lies outside Urik's purview; outside Nibenay's, as well. It is an oasis of death under Giustenal."

Wish for a surprise and get an unpleasant one. Once again Hamanu ran his fingertip over the writing. Five days, she'd said, since she had presented herself to his templars. Ten days, perhaps, since the words beneath his sensitive fingertip had been written. And how many days had passed between Chorlas's leaving the agafari staves for Giustenal's howling army and Chorlas's writing a message to his dear wife? Three, at best, if an old man had overcome elven prejudice, got himself a swift riding kank, then rode the bug into the ground.

Hamanu had his own spies, and those who rode kanks were ever in need of new bugs. He would hear about the staves, the oasis, and Giustenal's ambitions, but he hadn't heard it yet. He touched her mind, a gentle feather's touch that aroused neither her defenses nor her fears. She hadn't eaten in three days, not for poverty, but because her husband had returned to Urik. Chorlas was hiding in the slave quarters of their comfortable home. Between beats of Eden's heart, Hamanu found her Urik home and Chorlas within it. The elf was old and honest, for an elven merchant. His heart was weak, and he did truly wish to die within the massive yellow walls.

"What is your trade, Eden of House Werlithaen? Do you wish to die in Urik, like your husband?"

"O Mighty King, I do not care where I die," she said evenly. "But while I live, I wish to see my city's enemies ground beneath the heel of my king."

Hamanu laughedwhat else could any man do, face-to-face with a bloodthirsty woman? He took amber resin from a small box and held it in his hand until it was pliable. "I shall count it treason, then, if my templars do not report seeing you and your emeritus husband beside the Lion Fountain before sunset." He marked the resin with his sea ring, then hardened it again with icy breath.

Her face was pleasing and far from plain when she smiled.

* * * * *The ever-efficient Enver had completed his tasks in Joiner's Square and returned to the palace before Eden departed, still smiling. Perhaps he passed her on his way to the roof with the usual herd of slaves in his wake, armed, this time, with buckets and bristle brushes. Hamanu didn't ask, didn't pry, anymore than Enver asked about the Soleuse corpse.

Enver was, however, adamantly uninterested in becoming the Soleuse lord.

"Omniscience," the dwarf said from a bow so deep his forehead touched his knees. "Have I or my heirs displeased you so much?"

"Of course not, dear Enver." It was not a question that merited an answer, except that there was no way Enver could have seen his king's grimace. "But after what? almost three ages between you and your father, is it not? Perhaps you're ready for a change."

"Your welfare is my family's life, Omniscience. More than life, it is our eternal honor."

"I can remove any lingering focus"

Enver straightened suddenly, with such a look of outrage on his face that Hamanu was obliged to sit back a hair's breadth in his chair.

"I'd sooner die."

"Later, then, dear Enver. In the meantime, who was in charge downstairs this morning? That fool" Hamanu flicked a forefinger at the wet spot where Renady had died and the slaves were now scrubbing furiously"stood before me wearing a charm, dear Enver, a charlatan's lizard-skin charm which no one had confiscated. And later, a woman stood where you're standing and removed a message from a bead as large as your thumb! A useful message, to be sure Nibenay's sent agafari staves to Giustenalbut someone downstairs was more than careless, and I want that someone sent to the obsidian pits."

Enver knew which investigator had been in charge of the waiting room: the face floated instantly to the surface of the dwarf's mind, along with numerous details of the templar's currently troubled lifehis mother had died, his father was ailing, his wife was pregnant, and his piles were painfully swollennone of which mattered to Hamanu.

"To the pits, dear Enver," he said coldly.

And Enver, who surely knew he had no private thoughts when he stood before his king, nodded quickly. "To the pits, immediately, Omniscience." Not as a slave, as Hamanu had intended, but as an overseer, with his sleeve threads intact. The image was crystal clear in Enver's mind.

Hamanu didn't quibble. Left to his own devices, his rule over Urik would be rigid and far too harsh for mortal survival. Left to his own devices, he'd rule over a realm of the undead, as Dregoth did beneath Giustenal. Instead, Hamanu culled his templars, generation after generation, plucking out the debauched, the perverse, and the cruel like the late Elabon Escrissar, who'd contributed to the latest Nibenese picklefor his personal amusement. The others, the foursquare, almost-upright folk, he selected to translate his unforgiving harshness into bearable justice.

Enver, being one of the latter, was indeed too valuable to exile off to the Soleuse farmlands. Hamanu tolerated Enver's benign deceit as he'd tolerated Escrissar's malignancy. Both were essential parts of his thousand-year reign in the yellow-walled city. He'd have to find someone else for Soleuse.

In the meantime, the slaves had finished their labor. All that remained of Renady Soleuse was a fading wet spot beneath the brutal sun.

Morning was nearly afternoon when Hamanu prepared to go downstairs and deal with his city's larger and more public affairs. Burnished armor and robes of state had been laid out for his approval, which he gave, as he almost invariably did, with no more than a cursory glance at his wardrobe.

A patterned silk canopy had been erected over the pool where he would bathe alone, completely without attendants. It was time, once again, for loyal Enver to depart.

"I await your next summons, Omniscience," the dwarf assured him as he herded the slaves down the stairs.

Hamanu waited until all his senses, natural and preternatural, were quiet and he knew he was alone. A shimmering sphere shrouded his right hand as he stood up from his table: a shimmering sphere from which a black talon as long as an elf's forefinger emerged. With it, Hamanu scored the air in front of him, as if it were a carcass hung for gutting and butchering.

Mist seeped from the otherwise invisible wound, then, thrusting both hands into the mist, Hamanu widened the gap. Miniature gray clouds billowed momentarily around his forearms. When the sun had boiled them away, Hamanu held a carefully folded robe that was, by color and cloth, a perfect match for the robe he wore, likewise the linen and sandals piled atop the silk, He dropped the sandals at once and kicked one under the table. He dropped the silk after he'd shaken out the folds, and let the linen fall on top of it.

When Hamanu was satisfied that he'd created the impression of a heedless king shedding garments without regard for their worth, the dazzling sphere reappeared around his right hand. It grew quickly, encompassing first his arm and shoulder, finally all-of him, including his head. The man-shaped shimmer swelled until it was half again as tall as Hamanu, the human man, had been. Then, as quickly as it had appeared and spread, the dazzle was gone, and a creature like no other in the city, nor anywhere beneath the bloody sun, stood in his place.

Stark naked, Hamanu looked down upon what he had become. He fought nausea, or the memory of nausea, since even so minor a mortality as nausea had been denied to him for ages. Rajaat, the War-Bringer, the first sorcerer, had seen to that. But Rajaat had not made Hamanu what he was. Rajaat had had a vision, Hamanu had had another, and for the last thirteen ages, Hamanu's vision had prevailed.

His skin was pure black, a dull, fathomless shade of ash and soot, stretched taut over a scaffold of bones too long, too thick, too misshapen to be counted among any of the Rebirth races. There were hollows between his ribs and between the paired bones of his arms and legs. The undead runners of the barrens carried more flesh than Urik's gaunt Lion-King. Seeing Hamanu, no mortal would believe that anything so spindly could be alive, much less move with effortless grace to the bathing pool, as he did.

He paused at the edge. The still water of the bathing pool was an imperfect minor. It showed him yellow eyes and ivory fangs, but it couldn't resolve the darkness that had replaced his face. With taloned fingertips, Hamanu explored the sharp angles of his cheeks, the hairless ridge of his brows and the crest that erupted from his narrowing skull. His ears remained in their customary place and customary fluted form. His nose had collapsed, whattwo ages ago? or was it three? or even four? And his lips... Hamanu imagined they'd become hard cartilage, like inix lips; he was grateful that he'd never seen them.

Hamanu's feet had lengthened over the ages. He walked more comfortably on his toes than on his heels. His knees had drawn up, and though he could still straighten his legs when it suited him, they were most often flexed. Stepping down into the water, his movements resembled a bird's, not a man's.

He dived to the bottom of the pool and rose again to the surface. Habits that thirteen ages of transformation could not erase brought his hands up to slick nonexistent hair away from his eyes. For a heartbeatHamanu's hollow chest contained a heart; he hoped it remained human, though he couldn't know for certainhe sank limply through the water. Then the skeletal arms pumped once, demonstrating no lack of strength, and lifted his entire body out of the water.

The gaunt, black king had the power to hover motionless in the air or to fly faster than any raptor. Hamanu chose, instead, to return to the pool's embrace with a spectacular, unappreciated splash. He rolled onto his back and tumbled through the clear, warm water like a cart's wheel until he'd raised waves high enough to leave puddles on the roof. He was oblivious to everything except his own amusement until a bolt of pain lanced from his forefinger to his spine.

Roaring a curse at the four corners of the world, Hamanu made a fist and studied the pale red and gray sliver protruding through the soot-black flesh. It was bone, of course, human bone, another tiny fragment of his ancient humanity lost, now, forever. He pinched it between two talons and jerked it free.

A mortal man would have died from the shock. A mortal man did die. Deep within Hamanu's psyche, a mortal man died a hundred times for every year of his immortal life. He would continue to die, bit by bit, until there was nothing left and Rajaat's metamorphic spell would have completed its dirty work. The metamorphosis should have been complete ages ago, but Hamanu, when he'd understood what Rajaat had intended, had set his will against the War-Bringer. The immortal king of Urik could neither stop nor reverse his inexorable transformation; he slowed its progress through deprivation and starvation.

When his loathsome shape was concealed in a tangible human glamour, Hamanu ate with gusto and drew no nourishment from his food. In his own form, Hamanu lived with agony and hunger, both of which he'd hardened himself against. He could not die and had long since reached the limits of unnatural withering. Hamanu endured and swore that by force of will alone he'd deny Rajaat's spell until the end of time.

A bead of viscous blood the color and temperature of molten lava distended Hamanu's knuckle. He stared at it with disgust, then thrust his fist beneath the water. Stinking steam broke the surface as a sinuous black coil streamed away from the open wound. Hamanu sighed, closed his eyes, and with a sun-warmed thought, congealed his blood into a rock-hard scab.

Another lost battle in a war that had known no victories: magic in any form fueled the metamorphosis. Hamanu rarely cast spells in their traditional form and was miserly with his templars, yet his very thoughts were magic and all his glamours. Each act of defiance brought him closer to ultimate defeat. Even soand though no one glimpsing him in his bathing pool would suspect itHamanu was far closer to the human he'd been at birth than to what Rajaat intended him to become. Within his still-human heart, Hamanu believed that in the battle between time and transformation, he would be triumphant.

Dispersing the uncongealed blood with a swirl of his hands, Hamanu left the bath with his confidence restored. He stood with hands resting on the lion balustrade, letting the sun dry his back, while he surveyed the city.

At this hour, with the red sun just past its zenith, Urik rested quieter than it did at midnight. Nothing moved save for a clutch of immature kes'trekels making lazy spirals above the walls of the Elven Market. Slaves, freemen, nobles, and templars; men and women; elves, humans, dwarves, and all the folk who fell between had gone in search of shadows and shelter from the fierce heat. There was no one bold or foolish enough to gaze at the sun-hammered palace roof where a lone silhouette loomed against the dusty sky.

Hamanu touched the minds of his minions throughout the city, as a man might run his tongue along the backs of his teeth, counting them after a brawl. Half of the citizens were asleep and dreaming. One was with a woman; another with a man. The rest were lying still, hoarding their thoughts and energy. He did not disturb them.

His own thoughts drifted back to the woman, Eden, and her message. He asked himself if it was likely that the Shadow-King Nibenay, once called Gallard, Bane of Gnomes, would send staves of his precious agafari wood to their undead peer in blasted Giustenal. The answer, without hesitation, was yesfor a price.

There was no love lost between any of Rajaat's champions, including Dregoth of Giustenal and Gallard. They didn't trust each other enough for unrequited generosity. They didn't trust each other at all. It had taken a dragon, Borys of Ebe in the full culmination of Rajaat's metamorphosis, to hold the champions to the one cause that demanded their cooperation: maintaining the wards on their creator's netherworld prison, a thing they called the Hollow beneath a place they called the Black.

Hamanu recalled the day, over five years earlier, when Borys had been vanquished, along with several other champions. For one afternoon, for the first time in a thousand years, Rajaat had been free. The fact that Rajaat was no longer free and had been returned to his Hollow owed nothing to the cooperation of the three champions who'd survived Borys's death and Rajaat's resurrection. They distrusted each other so much that they'd stood aside and let a mortal womana half-elf named Sadira of Tyrset the prison wards.

It had been different long ago, in the Year of Enemy's Fury in the 177th King's Age. After Borys first set the wards on Rajaat's Hollow, there'd been nearly a score of immortal sorcerers ruling their proud heartland cities. With the passage of thirteen ages, they'd winnowed themselves down to seven. Then a decade ago, Kalak, the Tyrant of Tyr, had been brought down by his own ambition and a handful of mortal rebels, including one of his own high templars and Sadira, the same Sadira who'd vanquished Borys and reset the wards around Rajaat's Hollow.

In the Lion-King's judgment, Kalak was a fool, a careless fool who'd deserved the crime committed against him. Kalak was no champion. Hamanu had, perhaps, trusted the Tyrant of Tyr more than he trusted his peers, but he'd respected him less. He cursed Kalak's name each time it resurrected itself in his memory. Kalak's demise had left an unfillable hole in Tyr, the oldestif not the largest, wealthiest, or most powerfulcity in the heartland. And now, thanks in no small part to the subsequent behavior of the rebels who'd killed their immortal sorcerer-king, the thrones of Balic, Raam, and Draj were vacant, too.

It was easier to list who among Rajaat's champions was left: himself, Gallard in Nibenay, Inenek in Gulg, and undead Dregoth in Giustenalnone of them a dragon.

So long as Rajaat was securely imprisoned in the Hollow beneath the Black, Hamanu didn't object to the missing dragon.

Once Borys had completed Rajaat's metamorphosis and walked the heartland as a dragon, Borys had ruled everyone. Even the immortal sorcerers in their proud city-states had jumped to a dragon's whim. There had been wars, of coursecities devastated and abandonedbut the balance of power never truly changed. What Borys demanded, Borys got, because he kept Rajaat confined in the Hollow.

Now Borys was gone, a handful of thriving city-states had empty thrones, and the only thing keeping immortal greed in check was the knowledge that every surviving champion carried in his or her bones: use too much magic, draw too much spell-quickening power from the Dark Lens or any other source, and become the next dragon.

The prospect might have tempted some of themthough never Hamanuif they hadn't all watched helplessly as a maddened, mindless Borys ravaged the heartland immediately after they'd cast the spells to complete his metamorphosis. For his first hundred years, wherever Borys went, he sucked the life out of everything. When he was done, the heartland was the parched, blasted barren place it remained to this day.

Dregoth had already succumbed to temptation and drawn the wrath of his immortal peers. Borys had rounded them up for a second time, and they'd found a fitting eternal punishment for immortal hubris: they'd ruined his city and stripped all living flesh from the proud Ravager of Giants. He remained the champion he'd been on the day of his death, but he'd never be anything more. Dregoth was what folk called undead, kaiskarga in the halfling tongue, the oldest of the many languages Hamanu knew.

In shame, and under the threat of worse punishment, Dregoth had dwelt for ages beneath his ruined city. Mortal chroniclers forgot Dregoth, but his peers remembered especially Uyness of Waverly, whom living mortals had called Abalach-Re, Queen of Raam, and whom Dregoth remembered as his betrayer.

Now Uyness was dead with Borys, and Dregoth wanted Raam's empty throne. Hamanu reasoned that Nibenay might well support Giustenal's ambitions in that direction with agafari staves, because, whether or not he conquered every empty-throned city, Dregoth could never become another dragon as Borys had been. Like as not, Gallard would support Dregoth no matter which city the undead champion had designs upon. Like as not, Gallardwho fancied himself the most subtle of Rajaat's champions-hoped there'd come a day when he and Dregoth were the only champions left. If the price of attaining dragonkind was the annihilation of every mortal life in a city or three, how much easier to pay when none of the cities in peril were one's own?

Gallard had that much conscience, at least. Kalak hadn't hesitated at the thought of consuming Tyr. That's what got him killed by his own subject citizens and templars, but Kalak of Tyr had been a fool and freebooter from the start, long before the champions were created.

And Hamanu of Urikwhat had he been before he was an immortal champion?

Hamanu's thoughts sluiced sideways. In his mind's eye, he was suddenly far away from his precious city. He stood in another place, another time: a field of golden-ripe himali grain surrounded by hardworking kith and kin. Warm summer breezes lifted his hair and dried the sweat on his back. There was a hay rake in his youthful hands. A youngstera brother too small to cut grain or rakesat nearby with reed pipes against his lips, diverting the harvesters as they labored. The brother's tune was lost to time along with his name. But the dark-haired, gray-eyed maiden who stood behind the boy in memory, swaying in the music's rhythm, her name would never be forgotten while the Lion-King lived: Dorean.

For Dorean, Hamanu had become a man in his family's eyes. For him, Dorean had become a woman. The life that had once lain before them, filled with fields of grain, growing children, and a love that never needed words, was the only life Hamanu had ever wanted. If he'd done right by Dorean, if he'd protected her, as a man was sworn to do, he never would have seen the walls of Urik.

His body would lie beside hers, turned to dust and dirt a hundred times over.

A shadow wind sundered Hamanu's memory. He released the balustrade and turned around. A dusty breeze took shape, as tall as he was, yet far broader.

"Windreaver," he said flatly as the shape became substantial and the last commander of the troll army stood between him and the pool.

As big as half-giants, as clever as elves or dwarves, trolls had been formidable enemies for a champion-led army, and Windreaver had beenand remainedthe most formidable of the trolls. He'd lived and fought for two ages before he and a fifty-year-old Hamanu faced each other and Windreaver fought his last battle. A wispy curtain of silver hair hung around his swept-back ears, and the wrinkles above his bald brow were as pronounced as the brow ridge itself. Age had not dulled Windreaver's obsidian eyes. They were as bright, black, and sharp on the palace roof as they had been on the windswept cliff high above a wracken sea.

"Lose your wits?" Windreaver asked. If hate ever needed a voice, the troll stood ready to provide it. "Baking your brain till it's charred like the rest of you?"

Hamanu hissed, an effective, contemptuous gesture in his unnatural shape. When hate was measured, he and Windreaver were peers. If Enver was one aspect of Hamanu's conscience, Windreaver was the other.

The troll would have preferred to die with the rest of his kind; Hamanu had not offered a choice. Windreaver's body had become dust and dirt, as Hamanu's had not, but Windreaver lived, succored by the same starving magic that sustained Hamanu. He was an immortal reminder of genocide to the conquered and to the conqueror who had committed it.

"Look, there, on the horizon," Windreaver pointed to the southwest, toward distant Nibenay, exporter and abandoner of poorly stained agafari staves. "What do you see?"

"What did you see?" Hamanu retorted. "A bundle of sticks laid beside an old well?"

Windreaver served Hamanu. The troll had had no choice in that, either. The King of Urik could abide guilt and hate, but never useless things, be they living, dead, or in between. Windreaver was Hamanu's most trusted spy; the spy he sent to shadow his peers, his fellow champions.

"Do I need a fire to comfort me in my old age?" the troll retorted.

"Not when you can bring me bad news."

The troll chuckled, showing blunt teeth in a jaw that could crush stone. "The worst, O Mighty Master. There's an army forming on the plains beyond Nibenay. Old Gallard does not lead itnot yet. But I've skirled through the commanders' tents, and I've seen the maps drawn in blood on the tanned hides of Urikite templars. Nibenay's coming, Manu; mark me well, I know what I have seen. What Gallard sends to Giustenal doesn't matter. Gallard, Bane of Gnomes, means to become Gallard, Bane of Urik."

Hamanu bared his dripping fangs in contempt and disbelief.

Gallard might be marchingtoward Tyr perhaps, or more distant Draj. Draj had been Lord Ursos's home until two years ago, and amid the lord's debauched memories were images of its bloody anarchy. Gallard wouldn't waste his army against Urik's walls, not while Draj's throne sat empty. It was impolite to march across another champion's purview, but not unprecedented.

"You're wrong this time, Windreaver. You've overreached yourself."

Disappointed, Windreaver sucked air and tried again. "He brings his children, his thousand times a thousand children. He will set them in your place, and you will do his bidding, and I will hover about you, a swarm of stinging gnats to blind your eyes as you weep. Where are your children, Lion-King of Urik?"

A thousand years had sharpened the troll's tongue to an acid edge. His final question lanced an old, old wound. Hamanu hissed again, and the dust that was Windreaver swirled apart. "Urik is my child, with fifty thousand hearts, each braver than yours. Go back to Nibenay. Sting Gallard's eyes, if you dare. Listen to his words when there's no one else about to hear them, then tell me of his plans."

Dust rose on its own wind and was gone. Hamanu inspected the armor and garments the slaves had laid out for him. His taloned hand trembled as it made another misty gray slit in the afternoon's torrid air. Anger, he told himself as he shoved armor and garments together into the trackless netherworld. Rage at Windreaver, because the troll had done what he always did, and at himself, because this time the barbs had struck home.

Urik was his child, his only child. He'd face them all Gallard, Dregoth, anyone who dared threaten Urik. He'd risk the fate Rajaat laid before him, but for Urik's sake, he'd win. The Lion-King had never lost a battle, except for the very first.

A dazzlement surrounded his hand again and spread from there across his seared, withered form. When it was done, he was a tawny-skinned, black-haired man again, taller than he'd been at breakfast and brawnier, garbed in illusions of the panoply he'd hidden in the netherworld. His manicured hands no longer trembled; that was illusion, too.

There was a way, if they all came at him, all at once and in all their strength and he had to choose between himself and his city.... At least, Hamanu thought there was a way to preserve Urik. But the risks were incalculable, and he'd require the cooperation of a man who was, in his simple way, as extraordinary as any champion, a man who kept his own conscience and who served a primal force that couldn't be coerced.

The time, perhaps, had come to secure that man's sympathy. Without it, there could be a dragon more terrible than Borys roaming the heartland.

"I'll tell the whole story, in writing," Hamanu said to the rampant lions lining his balustrade. "When he has read it through, then he can judge for himself, and if he judges favorably, the Urik guardian will respect his plea when he calls."Chapter Three

Long after nightfall, when the slaves were locked in their quarters and the nightwatch templars drowsed in the corridors, Hamanu of Urik retreated from the rooftops and public chambers of his palace to its deepest heart, far from mortal eyes. Hamanu's midnight sanctum was a hidden cloister that resembled a peasant village; including a well and mud-walled cottages. Mountain vistas from a greener time were painted on the walls. A variety of common tools were available for working the vegetable plots, but the vines had turned to sticks and straw. The fruit trees bore neither fruit nor leaves.

The cloister's solitary door was always bolted, from the inside. When Hamanu visited his sanctum, he entered magically, stepping out of the same Unseen netherworld where he hid his clothes. Once inside, he sometimes opened the door, admitting Enver or another trusted person for a meal or conversation. But most times, when Hamanu came to his sanctum, he came to sit alone on a crude stone bench, bathed in starlight and memory.

This night, ten nights after Hamanu had heard Eden's and Windreaver's messages, ten nights, too, after he'd sent Enver kank-back across the northeast salt flats, the Lion of Urik shifted his bulk on his familiar stone bench. He'd brought a battered table to the cloister. It stood before him, crowned with a sheaf of pearly, luminousvirginvellum, upon which no marks had been made. An ink stone, oil, and a curved brass stylus lay beside the vellum, waiting for the king to complete the task he'd set for himself.

Or rather, to begin.

Hamanu had thought it would be easytelling his story in script, letting silent letters do the work of mind-bending or sorcery. He'd thought he'd have it written by the time Enver returned with Pavek, his self-exiled high templar, the earnest, novice druid upon whom Hamanu pinned such hope. He'd been wrong, as he hadn't been wrong in a king's age or more. The words were there in his mind, more numerous than the stars above him, but they writhed like snakes in a pit. He'd reach for one and find another, a different word that roused a dusty memory that he couldn't release until he'd examined it thoroughly.

He'd thought these chance recollections were amusing at first. Then, he deceived himself into believing such wayward thoughts would help him weave his story together. Those optimistic moments were over. He'd shed his delusions several nights ago: Writing was more difficult than sorcery. Hamanu had conquered every sorcery beneath the blood-red sun; the vellum remained blank. He was well along the path to desperation.

Six days ago, Enver had used his medallion to recount his safe arrival in thefrom Enver's urban perspective depressingly primitive druid village of Quraite. A few hours ago, at sundown, the dwarf had used his medallion again to recountvery wearilythat he and Pavek and half of Enver's original war-bureau escort were nearing Urik's gates.

What happened to the other half of the escort? Hamanu had thought of revengehis messengers traveled under his personal protection, his personal vengeancebut mostly he'd hoped for distraction, for anything that would rescue him from midnight and the ink stone.

Left behind, Omniscience: This Pavek is a loon, Omniscience. "Come home," I said to him, Omniscience, as you told me to, and the next thing I knew, he was mounted and giving orders like a commandant. He does not stop to eat or rest, Omniscience; he doesn't sleep. Four of your prize kanks are dead, Omniscience; ridden to exhaustion. If the ones we're riding now don't collapse beneath us, we'll be at Khelo by dawn. Whim of the Lion, we'll be in Urik by midday, Omniscience, else this Pavek will have killed us all.I'll alert your sons, dear Enver, Hamanu had promised, looking east toward Khelo and the reflection of the setting sun. Your weariness will be rewarded.Well rewarded. Since there was no excuse for vengeance, Hamanu had spent the early evening arranging proper welcomes for both the dwarf and the druid. Enver's sons had been warned of their father's impending return. A feast with cool wine and the sweet fruit the old templar loved was already in the throes of preparation. House Pavek, formerly House Escrissar, the residence that Hamanu had assigned for Pavek's city use, had been unlocked for the first time in two years. Freemen and women had been hired; Pavek would not be served by slaves. Larders had been restocked, windows had been unboarded, and the rooms were airing out by the time the moons had risen.

Everything would be readyexcept Hamanu's history.

There were no distractions in the cloister, no excuses left unused. There was nothing but this last night before Pavek's arrival and the sheaf of virgin vellum. With an unappreciated sigh, Hamanu smeared oil on the ink stone and swirled the stylus in a black pool.

He'd thought it would be easy, but he'd never told the whole story, the true story, to anyoneincluding himself and, with the stars sliding toward dawn, he still didn't know where to start.

"Recount," he urged himself. "Begin at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end, but, at the very least, begin!"* * * * *You know me as Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, King of the World, King of the Mountains and the Plains, the Great King, the Mighty King, King of the World. I am the bulwark of war and of peace wherever I hang my shield.

My generosity is legend... and capricious. My justice is renowned... for its cruelty. My name is an instrument of vengeance whispered in shadows. My eyes are the conscience of my city.

In Urik, I am called god, and god I am, but I did not choose to be anyone's god, least of all my own.

I was not born immortal, invincible, or eternal.

I was born a human infant more than a thousand years ago, in the waning years of the 176th King's Age. As the sun ascended in the Year of Dragon's Contemplation, my mother took to the straw and bore me, the fifth of my father's sons. She named me Manu, and before my black hair dried, she had wrapped me in linen and carried me to the Gelds, where my kin harvested himali. My father tucked a golden ear between my swaddled hands. He lifted me and the ripened grain toward the sun.

He gave thanks for the gifts of life, for healthy children and bountiful harvests. Without the gifts of life, a man would be forever poor; with them, he needed nothing more.

The women who had attended my mother and followed her to the fields passed around hot himali cakes sweetened with honey and young wine. All my kinfrom my father's father's mother to a cousin born ten days before meand the other families of Deche, our village, joined the celebration of a life beginning. Before sundown, all the women had embraced me, that I might know I was cherished. Each man had lofted me gently above his head and caught me again, that I might know the safety of strong hands around me.

I remember this because my mother often told me the story while I was still young and because such were the customs of a Deche family whenever a child was born. Yet, I also remember the day of my birth because now I am Hamanu and my memory is not what it was when I was a mortal man. I remember everything that has happened to me. After a thousand years, most of what I remember is a repetition of something else; I cannot always say with certainty when a thing happened, only that it did, many, many times.

Perfect memory is another portion of the curse Rajaat placed on the champions he created: I am jaded by my memories. Every day, I seek a new experience, one that does not echo endlessly through my past. I delve deeper and deeper into the mire of mortal passion, hoping for a moment I have not lived before, but I was born once, and once only. The memory of that day still shines as bright as the sun, as bright as my mother and father's faces.

Deche was a pleasant, prosperous place to be a child. It was pleasant because every family was well housed and well fed; my grandfather's family was the best housed and best fed of all. It was prosperous because the Cleansing Wars had raged since the 174th King's Age, and armies always need what villages provide: fighters and food.

Deche owed its existence to the wars. My ancestors had followed Myron Troll-Scorcher's first sweep through the northeastern heartland when the Rebirth races humankind's younger cousins: elves, dwarves, trolls, gnomes, pixies, and all the others except halflingswere cast out. My ancestors were farmers, though, not fighters. Once the army turned the trolls into refugees, my ancestors settled in a Kreegill Mountain valley, east of Yaramuke.

But Deche had never been a troll village. The trolls were mountain dwellers, stone-menminers and quarriers. Throughout their history, they traded with the other races for their food and necessities. That was their mistake, their doom.

Dependence made them vulnerable. Myron of Yoram the first Troll-Scorchercould have sealed the trolls in the Kreegills and their other strongholds. He could have starved them out in a score of years. He would have needed sorcery, of course, if he'd besieged them, and sorcery would have laid waste to the Kreegills. The valleys would have become ash and dust. Deche wouldn't have been founded. I wouldn't have been born....

So much would have been different if Myron Troll-Scorcher had been different. Not better, certainly not for Urik, which would never have risen to glory without me. Simply different. But Myron of Yoram was what he was: a vast, sweeping fool who drove the trolls out of the Kreegills with a vast, sweeping advance. He turned the stone-men into the stone-hearted fighters that his army could never again defeat.

Later, when I was the Troll-Scorcher, it was different. Much different. But that was later.

When I was born, the pixies were gone, the ogres and the centaurs, too. The center of the heartlandwhat was left of the once-green heartland after the Pixie-Blight, the Ogre-Naught, and the Centaur-Crusher had purged those races from itbelonged to humankind. The remaining wars were fought along the perimeter. Myron of Yoram fought trolls in the far northeast, where the barrens reach beyond sunrise to the middle of last night.

Once the trolls abandoned the Kreegills, it was destiny that human farmers would clear the valleys. All the rest was destiny, too.

After my birth, my destiny was tied to the Troll-Scorcher in ways that no one in Deche had the wisdom or magic to foresee. We weren't ignorant of our place in the Cleansing Wars. Twice a year, our grain-loaded wagons rumbled down to the plains where the Troll-Scorcher's bailiffs bought and sold. Men went down with the wagons; women, too. They gave their names to the bailiffs and got a weapon in return.

Sometimesnot oftenveterans returned to Deche. My middle brother didn't, but an uncle had, years before I was born. He'd lost one leg above the knee, the other below, to a single swipe from a troll-held axe. In time, all of his children made their way to the bailiffs. One of those cousins returned when I was ten. He had all his limbs, but his eyes were haunted, and his wits had been seared. He cried out in his dreams, and his wife would not sleep beside him.

I asked him what had happened, what had he seen?

"Fire," he said. "Fire as bright as the sun. Trolls screaming as their skin burned. Flames exploding from their eyes."

My cousin's words frightened me. I saw what he had seen, as if it were my own memory... as it is my own memory, now. When the Troll-Scorcher slew, he slew by fire that consumed from within. That was Rajaat's sorcery: all his champions can kill anything with a thought. Each champion had and retains a unique killing way that brings terror as well as death. But I was ten and ignorant of my destiny. With frightened tears on my cheeks, I ran from my cousin to my father.

"Don't make me go. Don't send me to the trolls! I don't want to see the fire-eyes!"

Father held me in his arms until I was myself again. He told me there was never any shortage of folk who wanted to join the Troll-Scorcher's army. If I didn't want to fight, I could stay in Deche all my life, if I wanted to, as he, my father, had done. As I clung to him, believing his words with all my heart and taking comfort from them, Dorean joined us. Silently, she took my hand between hers and brought it to her cheek.

She kissed my trembling fingertips.

It was likely that Dorean was a few years older than I; no one knew for certain. She'd been born far to the east of the Kreegills, where the war between the trolls and the Troll-Scorcher was an everyday reality. Maybe she'd been born in a village. More likely she'd been born in one of the wagons that followed the army wherever it went. Then her luck ran out. Myron of Yoram, whose idea of a picket line was a man holding the thong of a sack of rancid broy, left his flank unguarded. Troll marauders nipped his ribs, and Dorean was an orphan.

The bailiffs brought her out of danger; they did that out of their own conscienceloading their empty wagons with orphans and the wounded and bringing them back where trolls hadn't been seen in generations. Later, when the army was mine, I would remember what the bailiffs had done and reward them. But that day when I was ten and I looked beyond my father's arms, my eyes beheld Dorean's beauty for the first time, and the untimely vision of living torches was banished from my mind's eye.

"I will stay with you, Manu."

Surely Dorean had spoken to me before, but I had never truly heard her voice and, though I was young, I knew that I had found the missing piece of my heart.

"I will take Dorean as my wife," I told my father, my tears and fears already forgotten. "I will build her a house beneath the cool trees, and she will give me children. You must tell Grandfather. He cannot handfast her with anyone else."

My father laughed. He was a big man with a barrel chest. His laugh carried from one side of Deche to the other. Dorean blushed. She ran away with her hands held against her ears, but she wasn't displeased

And Father spoke with Grandfather.

I had six years to fall in love with Dorean, and her with me. Six years to build a tree-shaded house. Six years, too, to perfect my wedding dance. I confess I spent more time up in the troll ruins perfecting my dance to the tunes my youngest brother piped than I did making mud bricks for the walls of Dorean's house.

In the way of children, I'd forgotten my cousin's memories of trolls with flaming eyes. I suppose I'd even forgotten the tears that first drew Dorean to my side. But something of my mad cousin's vision must have lingered in the neglected depths of my memory. I never followed the himali wagons down to the plains, yet the trolls fascinated me, and I spent many days exploring their ruined homes high in the Kreegills.

The script of my own race remained meaningless to me, but I deciphered the inscriptions I found on the troll monuments. I learned their names and the names of the gods they chiseled into the stone they'd quarried. I saw how they'd panicked when they saw the Troll-Scorcher's army in the valleys below them, abandoning their homes, leaving everything behind.

Stone bowls sat on stone tables, waiting for soup that would never be served.

Their benches were made from stone, their beds, too; I was awed by what I imagined as their strength, their hardness. In time, I identified the tattered remnants of their blankets and mattresses in the dust-catcher corners, but my awe was, by then, entrenched.

Rock-headed mauls lay where they'd fallen beside half-cut stone. Their erdland-bone hafts had withstood the winds and weather of two king's ages. I could guess the damage such things could do to a human skull. But the mauls weren't weapons; I never found any weapons more deadly than a single-edged knife in the stone ruins.

In truth, the trolls were a placid race until Rajaat raised his champions and the champions raised their armies. Myron of Yoram taught the trolls to fear, to fight, and, finally, to hate the very thought of humankind. Yet, it is also true that Deche and the trolls could have prospered together in the Kreegill, if Rajaat had not interfered. Men did not quarry, and trolls did not farm. By the time I was born, though, there was no